KWC student’s project goes viral

A Kentucky Wesleyan student’s project swept across Twitter, making 10-million impressions in just a week.

The project is aimed at teaching students the power of social media. You could say freshman Emily Wheeler learned that lesson.

It was a simple project. Make a poster, write the assignment on that poster, and tweet it. All posters read “I am participating in a project for Dr. Hoover’s Ed Tech class on the effects of social media for today’s youth. Favorite/Retweet if you read this.”

“I was expecting five retweets and 10 favorites at the most,” Emily says.

Emily followed through Sunday night posting her picture and by Monday morning, she noticed the project was blowing her expectations away.

“Fifty started freaking me out. Then it started going to hundreds. Then it started going to thousands, and it just went out of control,” Emily says.

By the end of the week, her tweet had over 50,000 retweets, almost 300,000 likes, but the real shock came when she saw just how many impressions the tweet had…over 10-million.

“It was pretty scary actually because I don’t know 10 million people, obviously, so seeing that, it just scared me a little bit,” Emily says.

Dr. Leah Hoover teaches this education class and came up with this project hoping to teach her future teachers the power social media has on her students and their future students. One wrong post shared too many times can end a career, and Emily’s post proved social media hides nothing.

“The best thing that came out of this was the lesson, and it is to let the students know and the future teachers know that whatever they put out there is going to be seen. It’s kind of like a first resume,” Dr. Hoover says.

Emily says its been fun watching her post take off, but her professors project really sank in.

“It just really opened my eyes that people really do see what you post whether you think so or not,” Emily says.